animal disease
Puffballs ate my mulch
In which a prodigious colony of puffballs consumes my pile of mulch. Yesterday I walked by them at the tail end of a downpour. The last raindrops were generating little snorts of spores like dragon smoke. Go ahead, give them a stomp or two, but don’t inhale puffball spores in excess, people, it will not end well.
Entomophaga maimaiga – The caterpillar killer
Since we’d rather not let gypsy moth caterpillars eat the leaves off entire forests, we’re pretty happy about Entomophaga maimaiga, a fungus that attacks them. In this post we take a close-up, time lapse look at the devouring of a caterpillar by a fungus that is an effective agent of biological control.
A veterinary detective story
Since dogs can’t talk very well, it’s often difficult to figure out what’s making them sick. We recently told you about Shiloh, a beautiful dog who died of mushroom poisoning apparently caused by Galerina mushrooms. Now Shiloh’s Veterinarian, Dr. Carolyn Orr, speaks about her role in determining the cause of Shiloh’s rapid decline.
A simple way to preserve fungal cultures
In this post, PhD student Anuar Morales Rodriguez shares a cheap and easy method for maintaining collections of fungal cultures. If you don’t have access to a vat of liquid nitrogen or a lyophilizer, this method (first developed in Brazil at CIAT) allows you to store your favorite fungi over the long term as dried cultures on filter paper.
Riddled with ringworm?
Ringworm is a fungal infection of the skin–no worms are involved. That doesn’t make it a pleasant disease though. Here you can read up on the fungi that cause ringworm and a vaccine that can prevent it in animals. If you’re human, you’re on your own. We apologize if reading this post makes you itchy.
Furia ithacensis
Well now, everyone likes a dead fly, but I’m here to tell you that some dead flies are more spectacular than others. Like these gloriously dead snipe flies, exploded by a fungus that is named after my home town. If I were a birder, I’d call this find a “good bird,” and tick it off on my life list. Do you have a life list?
The Friday Afternoon Mycologist: The Dancing Nematode and the Helicospore
Lots of small twisty things, entwined. Some of them are moving. What the heck is going on here?
The Insect-Fungus War: Behavioral Fever
A student in pp309 wrote this post.
When people talk about fungi it’s usually in the context of a tasty dish, or that fuzzy brown thing on your peach, but rarely ever are fungi referred to as deft, vicious killers. What you say? Killers? Well, fungal pathogens have long preyed on insects, claiming [...]
Pilobolus and the lungworm
Jack, a student in PLPA 309 wrote this, and isolated the fungus in the time lapse, too.
Innocently spreading by mycelial growth, Pilobolus species faithfully secrete their extracellular enzymes, breaking down herbivore dung and recycling its nutrients. Upon maturation, Pilobolus species produce tiny fluid-filled vesicles, atop each of which a spore packet called a sporangium is [...]
Frogblog2: Origin and spread of the frog chytrid
PLPA 309 student Anna Savage wrote this post—a sequel to Frogblog1. She’s a grad student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell, and studies the frog chytrid.
Fungi in the phylum Chytridiomycota are incredibly ancient, biologically diverse, geographically widespread, and generally overlooked. Chytrids tend to be tiny, inconspicuous organisms that do not produce harmful [...]
Frogblog1: Chytridiomycosis and global amphibian decline
PLPA 309 student Anna Savage wrote this post (and its sequel). She’s a grad student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell, and studies the frog chytrid.
In the 1970s and ’80s, field biologists studying amphibian populations from around the world started to notice something strange: many of their study populations were disappearing. In [...]